some more burns on his hands putting out his boots and the legs to his coveralls, but he did it.
Easy, when it's either that or make an ash of yourself, he thought, and started to laugh. Then he realized it wasn't just his clothes-he'd been on fire, too. He howled like a wolf instead.
A foot soldier in green-gray ran up to Mel Scullard with a bucket of water and put him out. Scullard was already shrieking-yes, he'd got it worse than Pound. 'Corpsman!' the soldier yelled, and then, 'Hold on for a second, buddy, and I'll give you a shot.'
What about me? Pound wondered. He fumbled for the wound kit on his belt. That was a brand new hell-an inferno, in fact-because his hands were burned. He managed to get out the syringe and stick himself. He wanted instant relief. Hell, he wanted a whole new carcass. Every second he had to wait seemed an eternity. Maybe this is what Einstein means about relativity.
Inside the burning barrel, ammunition started cooking off. He hoped it wouldn't keep medics back. The first team that got there carried Sergeant Scullard away. 'We'll be right back for you, pal,' a little bespectacled guy called to Pound. He didn't wait for an answer.
Right back turned out to be something more like fifteen minutes. By then, the morphine syrette had kicked in. It didn't make the pain disappear, but did shove it into a dark closet so Pound didn't have to give all of his attention to it. Anything was better than nothing.
Here came that same stretcher team. 'Ease onto the litter, there,' the little guy said-he seemed to be in charge. He looked at Pound's legs with experienced eyes. 'Not too bad.'
'It's never too bad when it happens to somebody else,' Pound snarled, in no mood for sympathy.
The little guy blinked, then nodded. 'Well, I'm not gonna tell you you're wrong.' He turned to the other bearers. 'On three…One…Two…Three!' Up went the stretcher.
'How come we get the heavy guy after the light one, Eddie?' a bearer grumbled.
''Cause we're lucky, that's why,' said the guy with the glasses. 'Come on. Let's move.'
They took Pound back to an aid station a few hundred yards behind the line. Morphine or no morphine, he yelled and swore whenever a stretcher-bearer missed a step. He felt ashamed at being such a slave to pain, which didn't mean he could do anything about it.
Red crosses flew everywhere on and around the aid-station tent, which didn't keep bullet holes from pockmarking the canvas. 'Doc's still busy with your buddy,' Eddie said. 'Want another shot?'
'Yes, please!' Pound said, in lieu of grabbing him by the shirtfront and making him use the syrette. He hardly noticed the bite of the needle. The second shot really did send the pain off into some distant province.
He thought so, anyway, till they picked him up again and lugged him inside. That hurt in spite of all the morphine. 'How's Mel?' he asked the doctor, who was scrubbing his hands in an enameled metal basin.
'He's the other burned man?' The doctor had a funny accent, half New England, half almost French-sounding. He waited for Pound to nod, then said, 'I think he'll make it. He won't be happy for a while, though.' He turned to Eddie. 'Get this one up on the table, and we'll see how happy he'll be.'
'Right, Doc,' Eddie said.
Somebody-a medic, Pound supposed-stuck an ether cone over his face. The gas didn't just smell bad; it smelled poisonous. Even as consciousness faded, he tried to tear off the cone. They wouldn't let him.
When he woke up, his legs hurt so bad, he wasn't sure he'd really been anesthetized. But he lay in a bed somewhere that wasn't the aid station. His groan brought a real, live female nurse. She wasn't beautiful or anything, but she was the first woman from the USA Pound had seen in a devil of a long time. 'In pain?' she asked briskly.
'Yes,' he said, thinking, What the hell do you expect?
Even though she'd asked a dumb question, she had the right answer: 'I'll give you a shot.' As she injected him, she went on, 'The tannic-acid dressings do hurt, I know, but you'll heal much better because of them. Your burns won't weep so much, and you're less likely to get infected.'
'Oh, boy,' Pound said. Everything else seemed secondary to the way he felt. He tried to look around, but his eyes weren't tracking real well yet. 'Is Mel Scullard here?' he asked, adding, 'He's my gunner.'
'Yes, he's three beds down,' the nurse said. 'He hasn't regained consciousness yet.'
Poor Mel. He did get it worse than I did, Pound thought. Then the morphine started to kick in. It struck faster now than it had right after he got burned. Maybe that meant he wasn't fighting so much pain. He could hope so, anyhow. 'Ahh,' he said.
'We have to be careful with this stuff,' the nurse told him. 'We don't want you getting hooked.'
Right then, Pound couldn't have cared less if he had to stick a needle in his arm every hour on the hour for the rest of his life. If it made him stop hurting, that struck him as a good deal. Down underneath, there wasn't much difference between people and animals. War brought that out all kinds of ways. Pound wished like anything he hadn't found out about this one at firsthand.
T he officers' POW camp to which the Yankees took Jerry Dover was somewhere not far from Indianapolis. The train trip that brought him there wasn't much fun, but it was instructive just the same. Confederate wireless went on and on about all the sabotage that raiders behind U.S. lines were still perpetrating in Georgia and Tennessee and Kentucky.
Well, maybe they were. Even so, the train didn't have to stop once. It didn't even have to slow down. As far as Dover could tell, it didn't make any detours. Yes, bridges and overpasses were guarded. Yes, concrete blockhouses with machine guns sticking out of them protected some stretches of track. But trains seemed to get wherever they needed to go, and to get there on time.
Jerry Dover's train also had no trouble crossing the Ohio. All the bridges across what had been the C.S.-U.S. border should have been prime targets. They probably were. If this one, near Evansville, had ever been hit, it had also been efficiently repaired.
Evansville itself had been bombed. But it hadn't been flattened, the way so many Confederate cities were. It lay in the western part of Indiana, well away from the early thrust north that almost won the war for the CSA.
'They should have done a better job here,' complained the artillery captain sitting next to Dover.
'It's a big country,' Dover said. 'They couldn't get all of it.'
'Well, they should have,' the younger man repeated glumly.
He wasn't wrong. But if the United States turned out to be too big to let the Confederacy smash them all up, didn't that go a long way toward explaining why the war was going as it was? It sure looked that way to Dover.
Actually reaching the camp also told Dover his country was fighting out of its weight. He knew how the CSA housed prisoners of war. The Confederacy's camps were no sturdier than they had to be, because his country had nothing to spare. They probably didn't break Geneva Convention rules-you didn't want to give the enemy an excuse to take it out on POWs from your side-but he would have been amazed if they didn't bend them.
Camp Liberty! (with the exclamation point-a sardonic name if ever there was one) wasn't like that. Dover wouldn't have wanted to assault it with anything less than an armored brigade. It didn't just have a barbed-wire perimeter: it had a wall and a moat, with barbed wire on top of the wall and outside the machine-gun towers beyond the water. You got in there, you weren't going anywhere.
Inside, the buildings were as solid as if they were meant to last a hundred years. Yes, Indiana had harder winters than Georgia, but even so… The lumber and the brickwork and the labor the United Statescould afford to lavish on a place like this were daunting.
If the military clerk who signed him in were twenty-two years old and fit, Jerry Dover really would have been alarmed. But the man had to be at least sixty-five, with a white Kaiser Bill mustache the likes of which Dover hadn't seen since he quit fighting the damnyankees in 1917. Didn't this guy know they were as out of fashion as bustles? Evidently not; he seemed proud of his.
'You're in Barracks Twelve, and you'll sleep on cot seventeen,' the clerk declared in harsh Midwestern tones. 'Numbers are large. I don't think you can miss 'em.'
After that, Dover felt he ought to get lost on general principles. He couldn't, though, because the Yankee was right. Directional signs told you just where everything was. Barracks 12 was a brick building with a poured-concrete floor. Starting a tunnel and keeping it hidden would be a bitch, or more likely impossible.
Two stout coal-burning stoves sat there to heat the hall in winter. A wireless set was playing an insipid Yankee tune when Dover walked in. The Confederates punished POWs for clandestine wirelesses. U.S. authorities equipped the halls with them. That was daunting, too.
